Andromeda rising over Mono Lake, California, USA. (Did you know Andromeda is 6 times the visual size of the moon? Unfortunately everything but the core is too dim to see with the naked eye, so it looks like a tiny smudge of light, but it's actually very large in the sky.)
This was shot with a 300mm lens and star tracker. There was 1 noisy reference image, and it was denoised by stacking a bunch of shots before it with the star tracker off (to denoise the ground), and a bunch of shots after the reference image with the star tracker on (to denoise the sky), with appropriate masking applied to prevent the moving areas from being factored into the stacking.
jforkner wrote:
To me, the size of Andromeda appears out-of-scale with the foreground. Was a different focal length used for the tufa?
Jack
Nope, it's all at 300mm. Nothing was changed over the course of the shoot except the tracker being switched on when it rose to the desired height. Finding a foreground at 300mm was hard. Here's what it looked like from a wide angle image that I found on Google Maps.
Very nice, looks like a cover for an astronomy magazine.
That entire area is a landscape photographers paradise. Being from the east coast, when I visited a few years back on a work trip working with Mono County, I hit Bodie, Mono Lake and Yosemite for a couple of days.
WoodDawg wrote:
Very nice, looks like a cover for an astronomy magazine.
That entire area is a landscape photographers paradise. Being from the east coast, when I visited a few years back on a work trip working with Mono County, I hit Bodie, Mono Lake and Yosemite for a couple of days.
Yeah totally. Also every time I go back to Mono I discover more wacky geological phenomena I hadn't known about before.
I shot a photo of the Milky Way over some slot canyons in the area I'll post later.
mastadont2 wrote:
Amazing. And lots of work and preparation. Just curious: is it a sufficiently dark sight?
Could you clarify what you mean by sufficiently?
It is probably one of the best dark sky sites in California. Not as good as the middle of Death Valley, but pretty close. It's more than sufficient in that I was able to capture this ...
Terrific photo, for which you did a lot of planning, and a lot of work in processing! Based on my one experience at Mono lake shooting at night, I am wondering if you had to deal with airliners flying to/from LAX crossing the skies you were shooting. Did you have to remove planes from your images?
